Finnesse
by The Cat's Whiskers
Summary: Tired and grumpy Sentinel is offered cholesterol heaven in breakfast form on Sandburg's dime...as long as they eat out. What possible catch could there be? Cue the Sandburg zone.
1. Chapter 1

**Disclaimer:** Pet Fly owns, only for fans reading pleasure, etc, etc.

_This story was written as a gift for Gail Gardner, SentinelAngst list member (her website is Ship's Cat), in thanks for putting me up (and putting up with me) on a week's visit to Finland at Easter 2005, however, __**please**__ read the Author's Note at the end! This story has a serious point to make. If you are a male fan fiction writer, or a male reader of fan fiction, I would particularly encourage you to read this story._

_This story was amended and posted to for bardtotheages in September 2011. _

_Warnings: please see Author's Note at end._

_Summary: Sandburg offers to buy his suspicious Sentinel a glorious cholesterol laden breakfast…cue the Sandburg Zone. _

**FINNESSE**

"Come on, Jim," Sandburg's voice floated up, "How can it take a guy so much time to comb so little hair?"

Jim walked down the steps from his bedroom, his steps slowing and his expression changing from annoyed to confused as he took in his room-mate and Guide, Blair Sandburg. Today it was Sandburg's turn to cook breakfast, but nothing was happening. There was no coffee percolating in the machine, no bread in the toaster, no bacon sizzling on the grill (he had still no been able to persuade/bribe/intimidate Sandburg into frying foods). Blair, instead of pottering around the kitchen in his usual sleep-wear of vest and boxers, busy rustling up food for his hungry Sentinel, was standing fully dressed and wearing his jacket, boots and backpack at the door, clearly ready to leave.

"Come _on_, Jim." Blair repeated with impatience.

"Where are you going? You're supposed to be making breakfast?" Jim was in no mood to enter the Sandburg Zone this morning.

They'd cracked two big cases in the last thirty-six hours, and neither had resulted in them being able to get a little if any sleep during that time. Which was just tough – they were due on the straight twelve-hour shift that all MCU personnel pulled once every two weeks and the fact that they'd had no rest in the preceding thirty-six hours was their problem. Jim wanted lots of awesomely strong coffee, an entire pig's worth of bacon rashers and California's entire corn crop of toast and biscuits inside his gullet before he ventured forth.

"I'm buying you breakfast." Blair urged. "Anything you want. Go wild. Just _hurry up_."

"Buying breakfast," Jim folded his arms and regarded his room-mate steadily, perfectly well aware that they had more than adequate yummy breakfast foodstuffs in the loft kitchen. "Where?"

"That new place that's just opened at the end of the block." Blair recited the words in a clearly irritated sing-song. "I got talking to Hilka, the lady that owns it and said we'd stop by for breakfast. Look Jim, I. Am. Buying. Then we can go straight into the station."

_Damn, if I've been sucked into the vortex that is the Sandburg Love Connection I'll kill him, _Jim glared at his room-mate even as he plucked his jacket from the coat hook by the door and prepared to put his boots on. "Sandburg, if this place tries to pass off tofu and hikers trail mix as real food, then I swear –"

Blair snorted. "I wish, man. Hilka is Finnish. They don't believe anything is properly cooked unless it contains as a minimum of a pound of butter and a pint of cream."

Finnish? As they left the loft, Jim wasn't reassured. Flaxen haired Nordic Goddess or no, if she offered him fried rasher of Rudolph, he was out of there…

Luckily there was a parking slot directly outside the new café, which had been named _Finnesse_ rather than Finesse; _very droll_, thought Jim sourly. They were the first customers as Hilka had just opened the café; she turned out not to be a six-foot-four Wagnerian Valkyrie a la _The Ring Cycle_ but a short, plump brunette with a happy grin and a wicked laugh.

Naturally, Blair had learned her life story in the first ten minutes of their initial meeting and so briefed Jim in an undertone as they took seats at a window table. Her mother was a stereotypical Finn in looks but her father was an American of Anglo-Amerindian descent, from whence she got her dark hair and brown eyes; she'd been born in Seattle but from the age of six months had lived in Finland. All Finns were at least trilingual, speaking Finnish, Swedish and English, plus usually Russian. Her father's job had taken Hilka's family all over the Scandinavian Peninsula with the net result that she spoke Danish, Inuit, French, Italian and German as well. In the melting pot that was Cascade, Hilka was finding that despite its newness, her fledgling business was taking off. This corner block was at the juncture of Little Italy and the Russian Quarter and she was already getting regular customers from these ethnic groups.

"Okay, Sandburg," Jim grumped, "I'm sold. But I swear if she tries to make reindeer any part of this –"

Blair glared at him then redirected his attention as Hilka came back bearing two large mugs of coffee with hot, frothed milk. As she placed them on the table, Blair switched his glare to a smile and said to her what Jim swore sounded like, "Kitty, Kitty" before launching into a conversation utterly incomprehensible to Jim; the only thing he knew now that he didn't before was that Blair was fluent in Finnish. Yep: _hello Sandburg Zone. What kept yah?_

"What did you order?" he asked, thinking unhappily of 'kitty, kitty'.

"Rudolph, Prancer, Dancer and Blitzen…" sniped Blair, adding two sugars to his coffee and taking a large slurp.

"Blair, I swear if she serves us fried reindeer –"

"Oh relax your anal-retentive self," Blair rolled his eyes, good humour apparently restored by the coffee. "No reindeer were harmed during the making of this breakfast. Besides, you don't _fry_ reindeer; you should sauté it with bacon and mushrooms…"

Jim hesitated on the verge of taking issue with the 'anal-retentive' crack, aware that so far this morning his own attitude has been less than stellar, and that the younger man looked even more tired than Jim felt. Just like him, Blair had spent the last day and a half working to bust those two big-league drug smuggling rings, and just like him, Blair was now on the MCU rota for the 12-hour shift looming horribly in their immediate futures.

Temporary Captain Finkelman – okay, Sarah, she hadn't been that bad really – had shown up their point of vulnerability when she had followed procedure and immediately revoked Blair's long-expired 90-day ride along, on the unarguable grounds that Blair was so integrated with the MCU that everyone in it treated him as 'one of them' to the point he was actively involved in investigations that led to situations so dangerous seasoned SWAT officers would have paused. The brutal reality was that Blair hadn't been sanctioned or insured, nor had the department.

Simon and his secretary Rhonda and Taggart, them, had put some serious and devious thought into the problem, and now Blair was on the Police Dept payroll – albeit at a very low stipend – as the Major Crimes Unit's 'Consultant Criminal Anthropologist'. Not forensic anthropologist, but criminal anthropologist, a role that Rhonda had basically invented one night watching the Discovery Channel. Instead of studying and profiling criminals and killers after they were dead, Blair studied them alive and fresh – 'proactively not reactively' as he had put it – like they were an unknown Amazonian tribe just discovered. Blair had been able to get several grants and Simon some social funding to help pay for their little scheme, and to Jim's well hidden relief, Blair had delayed moving out of the loft back to a new own apartment yet again – since he'd been $850 a month rent and utilities on that ghastly warehouse, financially he was 'okay' enough to get by on his PD consultant stipend and his TA salary.

Which was why Blair looked so completely exhausted, because unlike Jim, in the brief periods he hadn't at the station during the previous 36-hours of police fun, Blair was in his own 'office', that cubby-hole joke of an artefact storage room, pulling all-nighters to catch up on his work and ensure that when the students and other staff arrived at Rainier, they found fully prepared information and graded essays.

The whole Ventriss saga had highlighted just how much of his teaching job Blair had missed over the past four years due to being with the MCU and the attitude of Dean Marcia _Bug-Up-My-Ass_ Edwards had proven that when it came to ethics, academic principles and supporting her staff, she would drop them like hot rocks in kow-towing to spoilt brat students with rich daddies. Since then Blair had been anal-retentive himself in not asking others to cover his classes and so forth.

Jim would have liked to have suggested he quit the TA role, but Blair was a natural teacher and the combination of grants, PD salary and TA salary and co-tenancy at the loft meant he had been able to start paying off some of his student loans early whilst still being able to save enough in a 'disaster fund/unemployment buffer'. It had been clear how if important it was to Blair to retain his own identity outside 'the Sentinel's Guide' and to work in some academic arena, and yes, he had been visibly smug at the way his being able to start paying off his student loans early had made dear Dean Edwards grind her teeth. Simply, if he was vertical and walking, Blair did the work at Rainier as well as the PD. But now Jim guiltily realised that Blair was, as usual, taking a quart out of a pint pot when it came to energy.

However, Jim's intention to be conciliatory went the way of all good intentions as Hilka reappeared bearing two plates on each of which resided what looked like a mound of scrambled eggs on top of two oval puff-pastry objects.

"Carrellian Pancakes." Blair rubbed his hands with glee.

Jim glared at a description that sounded like it came straight off the menu in the _Star Wars' _Mos Eisley cantina scene. "What?" He looked down at the mixture suspiciously as Hilka placed it in front of them and disappeared again.

"A Carrellian pancake is short-grain white rice inside a puff pastry case. You hard-boil eggs, chop them up, and mix butter into them while they're still hot, then serve on the pancakes…just try it, Jim." Blair said with a hint of snap in his tone.

Aware that Blair was moving from just 'morning blues' to genuine anger, Jim obediently cut off a corner slice and placed it in his mouth, chewing stoically and trying not…to…think…about the taste - which was great. He looked down, cut a huge slice off and tried again just to make sure.

"Ladies and gentlemen, we have a winner," Blair muttered with only a _soup__ç__on_ of sarcasm as he grinned involuntarily at Jim's enjoyment before tucking into his own breakfast.

Jim polished both pancakes off in short order, and the mug of strong but excellent coffee. Since Sandburg was springing, he decided on another round of both, and Hilka was only too happy to comply, topping up Blair's mug at the same time as the younger man ate more slowly.

Jim started on round two, ignoring Blair's amused chuckle, and bent his mind to the task of how to make sure they came here regularly without having to admit to Mr Smugly Smirking Guide that okay, he had called it right. However, as he ate, savouring the pleasant textures and tastes, Jim never left 'cop mode', which was why he'd chosen a seat that gave him a clear view of the sidewalk. He constantly scanned his surroundings both inside and out, being aware at all times of the people passing outside and the automobiles at the junction.

Due to his position, he had a perfect view when the bus drew up at the stop light right outside the café window; he glanced up and therefore saw Sandburg stark naked. He blinked; not 99-percent naked with tastefully arranged fig leaf, sheet, etc. One hundred percent _au naturel_, butt _nekkid_.

"Jim!" Blair yelled frantically, skidding back his chair as semi-masticated egg, rice and mashed up flecks of pastry sprayed all over the table, him and his own breakfast. But instantly he forgot his ire as Jim gagged and hacked. "Jim?"

Leaping up, Blair instantly moved to support Jim's torso as the man coughed and choked. Instinctively rubbing his hand in concentric circles at the top of Jim's back as the big man wheezed, Blair grabbed the glass of water he'd poured and held it to Jim's lips so he could sip it.

"Easy, easy," he soothed in desperate worry, completely bewildered.

Part of the reason why he'd brought Jim here was because Carrellian Pancakes were the ideal Sentinel breakfast – rice, eggs, butter and puff pastry were in the top ten 'no danger to the Sentinel' food list and as long as Hilka hadn't poured several pounds worth of salt and pepper into the mix Jim would never have a problem.

"Jim, what is it? What's wrong?" He raised his head and glared furiously at Hilka, even more enraged when she merely stood, seemingly frozen, as Blair snarled, "What did you do? What did you put in it?"

His hand trembling from the attack, Jim slowly raised it and gripped Blair's chin like a vice. Blair instinctively tried to pull back as his lips and cheeks were squeezed together in what would have been a humorous way in any other circumstance but Jim deliberately tightened his hold till it was painful and forced Blair's head to the right. The light changed to green and outside Blair saw his own nude body down the length of the bus as it slowly pulled away.

"Oh," Blair said without any modicum of surprise never mind shock, "that."

"What the hell did you do Sandburg?" rasped Jim, his throat still sore from the choking bout as he glared at the younger man.

Blair shrugged, blatantly unconcerned, "I did some modelling."

"_Some 'modelling'?_" Jim repeated the phrase loudly as shock gave way to anger.

"Yes, some modelling! It's not like you haven't seen it all before –" he winced as he realised what he'd just said.

Hilka's tiny squeak was drowned out by Jim's outraged bellow of _"Sandburg!"_

"I didn't mean it like that," Blair addressed Hilka in an attempt at damage control, "We're just room-mates."

She made another tiny squeak as if in answer while her eyes never lifted any higher than about two inches below his belt buckle. Mostly concentrating on the large, fuming cop now seriously invading his personal space, a small part of Blair's mind acknowledged that her action was probably some sort of cosmic payback for every guy who spent ages talking 'to' a woman but never raised his gaze above her cleavage.

Jim was still glaring furiously, though Blair's statement had been true in the literal sense. From the age of eighteen until thirty-three, Jim had been in the U.S. Army, used to living in barracks with a large number of other men and where personal space and privacy for hygiene was non-existent. Blair likewise had grown up in communes and cultures with liberal attitudes to clothing and nudity.

Whatever their other neuroses, hang-ups about nudity weren't on the list for either Jim or Blair; neither man exactly paraded around the loft in the altogether, but it wasn't uncommon for them to be in a 'two men, one bathroom and both late for work' situation, wherein each was more concerned about getting ready as fast as possible than being precious about the fact that the other wasn't wearing any clothing.

"And you never thought it worthwhile to mention to me that naked posters of you were going to be splashed all over the city?" Jim barked.

Blair blinked. "How on earth could I have known – wait a minute. Obviously you were too busy ogling to look at my head."

"Oh I saw your head!" Jim snapped.

There was a moment of charged silence then Hilka whirled on her heels, her face flaming, and hurried into the back. Both men could hear her laughing hysterically.

"I meant you didn't look at my _face_." Blair reiterated, clearly trying not to laugh himself.

Jim sucked in a deep breath as his fury surged anew at this flippancy; one of the few flashpoints in their partnership was that the Sentinel tended to be very possessive and insecure over keeping his or her Guide and thus tended towards attempting 'ownership' behaviour and attitudes, and the Guide – a good one at least – understood the Sentinel's needs but didn't enable or cave in to such an unhealthy attitude that would severely tip the balance of power in the Sentinel-Guide bond and ultimately prove emotionally destructive. Jim was aware that he was teetering on the edge of grossly over-reacting and that Sandburg and he would have a really angry outburst at each other if he didn't get a grip. So…breathe, think, and _don't_ start yelling…yet.

He hadn't really taken in anything other than his Guide's nudity, but having perfect recall courtesy of his Sentinel senses enabled him to extract the subliminally absorbed image of Blair's face from the poster. His righteous anger stuttered a bit as his brain compared the face on the poster to that of the man standing not a foot away and – "Your hair. You had short hair..."

"I was twenty-two when that photograph, amongst others, was taken, and I was living in Finland." Blair stated. "I knew they were using one of the images when I got the royalty cheque last week, but I had no idea of which one, or where it would be. It could as easily have been London or Rome as Cascade." He dropped the money for breakfast plus a large tip on the table as even he could hear from the muffled gurgles that Hilka was still in no condition to come back out of the kitchen. "If you've finished freaking out, we need to be in work."

Jim winced as he and Blair left the café. Cops were merciless at the best of times; the taunting that would result from his partner's nude body being plastered across Cascade's public transport did not bear thinking about. To his astonishment though, they walked back to Sweetheart without incident.

"I can't believe nobody's looking at us." Jim muttered as he unlocked his beloved truck.

Blair heard him and shrugged. "Of course not, as far as everyone's concerned a fashion model is a glamorous person who lives on the beach in Malibu or Waikiki. They don't expect to see the guy on the poster walk past them a minute later. Although, if everyone's like _you_ very few people will be noticing my face, apparently."

Jim flushed, hating being on the defensive. "So how many more of these posters are likely to show up?"

"Relax; I only did that one shot in the nude." Ignoring Jim's loud sigh of relief, Blair explained, "I lived in Finland for a while on a project for Rainier. They were looking for fashion models and paying a good rate. I couldn't afford to pay for professional photos to be taken, so I hired the equipment for an afternoon and did them myself. Fortunately my portfolio passed muster and since I'm also the photographer I retain the image rights, so I get a small royalty fee whenever one of them is used."

Jim nodded understanding; Blair had had numerous articles published in various periodicals and scientific textbooks, and sometimes received small royalty cheques whenever any of his work was reproduced. If Blair had done the modelling in Finland it was highly unlikely any more of his photographs would turn up being used in the States; it could only be the Sandburg Zone at work that the only nude shot he'd done was the one chosen for use in Cascade…_or knowing the Sandburg Zone the entire Pacific Northwest. Please god, no,_ Jim prayed as he pulled Sweetheart in the Cascade PD's parking garage.

Any hopes Jim entertained that nobody noticed anything were almost instantly extinguished. Lorraine Kovacs, one of Vice's few female detectives, flirted outrageously with Blair while her partner Dan Freeman glared in the background. By the time the elevator had ridden up to the seventh floor, Blair had been hit on by every female cop and glared at by every male cop.

They entered the MCU bullpen and immediately an outraged cry rang out, "Sandburg! You're getting my cleaning bill!"

"H.?" Blair asked in disbelief as big, black – and usually cheerful - Detective Henri Brown approached them, only this time with a fierce scowl, and wearing unheard of attire of conservative navy slacks, white shirt, tie and jacket as opposed to his usual grunge-type baggy pants and eye-wateringly exuberant Hawaiian shirts.

"What happened?" asked Blair, warily.

"You're what happened." Henri glared at them as the MCU's other detectives grinned. "I never got to taste my vanilla Frappucino; I spilled it all down my favourite Hawaiian shirt and my pants when a bus sailed past the diner window with you plastered naked all down the side. If Mr GQ here hadn't had an account at that fancy tailor's on 5th and Vine," he jerked a thumb at his partner, Rafe, "I would have been the one in the altogether."

"Sandburg!" Simon Banks came out of his office with his glare cranked up full. "You mind explaining what the hell you were doing?"

"Looks like I wasn't the only one who didn't notice your face, Chief," Jim cracked but subsided as Simon's face became deadly.

Once again, Blair reiterated his explanation, finishing, "The nude shot was for a good cause, a cancer charity, which was why I did it. Read the wording on the poster," he advised them slyly.

Simon gave a snort of irritation. "Sandburg, from now on I intend to keep my eyes _closed _whenever I leave this building." He glared, "Back to work, people! Unfortunately I doubt we can count on the criminals in this city being stunned into honesty by the sight of Sandburg in his birthday suit."

© 2005 & 2011, The Cat's Whiskers

Continued in Chapter 2…


	2. Chapter 2

**Disclaimer & etc: See Chapter 1**

**FINNESSE**

**Chapter 2**

The answer machine kicked in just as Jim entered the loft; since his hands were full of Chinese food, he ignored the call, which was for Sandburg from Rainier anyway. Depositing the food on the counter top, he removed his gun and badge and went into the bathroom for a quick wash to freshen up before coming back out and starting to lay out the food as his ears locked onto Blair's Volvo about two blocks away.

Technically it was Blair's turn to cook but mid-terms were looming and Blair seemed to be in a dozen places all at once with sleep and food being removed off his schedule. In comparison, Jim had spent most of the last week, and today, twiddling his thumbs in court to ensure their two big drug-case busts got the maximum possible sentencing; fortunately the judge was an old hand, eminently sensible, and the jury for once weren't insane or expecting every case to be like _CSI, The Mentalist, Lie To me, Silent Witness, Body of Proof, _or whatever current 'procedural' TV show turned them all into vastly superior detectives than say, oh, the police, and the defence attorneys didn't have delusions of being Perry Mason. So while he was bored and fed up, he wasn't emotionally frazzled, drained, frustrated or furious. To Jim's relief, Blair had taken the tormenting of the cops at the PD with good grace and wry humour over the poster, such as the anatomically correct series of balloon animals made out of condoms that kept appearing on Sandburg's desk; Jim recognised the handiwork of Bernardo Bertorelli in Vice. Sandburg, with niceness typical of him, had brought them home and they now stood in 'proud parade' along one of his bookshelves in his bedroom/study.

By some miracle, Jim had only ever seen the dreaded poster once more in the past month, and he had been prepared for the shock. What had surprised him more was the stark line in white capitals above the nude image: WHAT TERMINAL TESTICULAR CANCER LOOKS LIKE. However, Blair had said that the nude shot was for a cancer charity, and it was typical of Blair to leap right in and help if asked regardless of how out in left field the cause might be.

Familiar footsteps approached the loft and Blair entered, sniffing loudly and grinning as he sighted the Chinese food. "You got dinner? Thanks, man." He placed his jacket on the hook and dropped his backpack by the couch, coming straight over to the breakfast bar.

They ate in companionable silence, Jim noting how Blair devoured the food like a starving wolf and so, despite his own love of Chinese goodness, he actually ate less than he made it appear, allowing Blair to consume a good two thirds of the food, which the younger man practically inhaled. Obviously the kid had been skipping lunch as well as practically any sleep if the entire _Louis Vuitton_ collection of bags under his eyes was anything to go by. Blair finished and quickly rinsed their crockery as Jim grabbed a beer and headed to watch the early evening news before the Cascade Jaguars game. The detective raised one bottle questioningly but Blair shook his head, hefting the backpack and making for his room.

"Oh, wait, Rainier left a message for you about a meeting." Jim told him.

"Thanks." Blair hit play, listening to the message about a change in time with a strange lack of expression, before lifting the cordless phone off the cradle and hitting the speed-dial button for Rainier while he walked into his room out of deference to Jim watching the news. He heard Blair tell someone the change of time was not a problem then tuned his friend out as the news came on. Blair returned to replace the phone in the cradle and then went back into his room, the familiar scratching of his pen indicating he was grading papers, with occasional sub-vocal 'sighs' or 'mmms' indicating respectively a student who had probably plagiarised the paper wholesale or been lazy and one who had been engaged and diligent enough to make an effort.

Jim grinned as the local news came on and his court case was the headline. Whilst it was irritating to sit there every day while the legal weasels wrangled, in this case it was worth it. They had Edward Lascelle six ways from Sunday on so many drugs charges the guy would never see the outside of a jail cell until he was carried out in a coffin and the increasingly pasty pallor of his defence attorney showed the guy knew he was fighting a lost cause. As the lead detective in the case, Jim had taken carefully hidden pleasure in getting up on the stand and putting as many extra nails as he could in Lascelle's already well-sealed coffin –

The phone rang in the middle of the segment and Jim scowled as he picked it up, drawing in a breath, but before he could demonstrate his irritation with a sharply barked 'Ellison', the caller spoke without preamble and he blinked as he heard the acid tones of Dean Marcia Edwards.

"Sandburg, I shall come straight to the point. I am calling to offer you the chance to resign with immediate effect, rather than drag the good name of this institution through the mud at the Special Review tomorrow. Before you answer this offer, I should make it quite clear that I have a copy of that quite disgusting…_tape_…and I am shocked and appalled. You are of course within your rights to attend the Special Review tomorrow, but let me make it quite clear that the morals clause in your contract enables me to terminate your employment with immediate effect. I am absolutely –"

"Talking to the wrong guy," Jim interrupted. "I am _Detective_ James Ellison, _Mr _Sandburg's room-mate. I certainly hope that I'm not hearing the Dean of Rainier University making threats against a member of her staff?"

The woman spluttered incoherently on the other end of the phone. A hand reached over and tugged the phone from Jim's hand as Blair took it, having come out of his room in time to hear Jim identify the caller. "Dean Edwards, this is Blair Sandburg speaking. What can I do for you?"

Without utilising his aural abilities, Jim easily heard the woman's strident tones as she reiterated to Blair what she'd just said, and his eyes narrowed at the way she sneered, 'room-mate' twice in a derogatory tone that clearly implied she thought the term was a euphemism.

"I don't think so." Blair's tone was coolly calm, his respiration and vital signs equally as undisturbed. "I'm quite aware of the tape's existence, Ms Edwards. I shall see you at the Special Review meeting tomorrow." Without saying goodbye or allowing her to reply, he terminated the call, looking tired.

"What's going on, Chief?" Jim frowned at Blair's weary face. "What tape, and what's this Special Review?"

Blair gave a sigh. "I think I'll have that bottle of beer after all."

Jim muted the sound on the TV as Blair headed for the kitchen and popped the top of a bottle of beer before coming back into the living area and slumping on the couch. "The Special Review meeting has been called as an emergency session by the university's Board of Governors, they're considering firing me because of the morals clause in my contract."

"Morals clause - _you_?" Jim raised both his eyebrows. For all his cracks about table-legs and Blair's revolving door love-life, affectionate teasing was all that they were - Jim never for a moment had any worries about Blair having an inappropriate affair with one of his students or doing anything morally unethical. Blair was an honourable and sensible man – he was the master of his body, not its slave. "Is that the tape she was going on about?"

"Yeah-huh," grunted Blair. "See, when I did that nude shot for the cancer charity, it sold really well, so at the same time these porn-flick producers illegally used my photograph to promote their movie. They picked a guy with curly brown hair who superficially looked like me from the back and made out it was me with a lot of soft-focus lens shots and stuff. By the time anybody found out what was going on – nearly a year later by then - and stopped their little game the damage had been done. As part of damage control I stipulated that the nude image could only be used in medical and cancer based charity campaigns to take the glamour away. Mostly it works but every so often when they use the photograph the movie pops up again hanging on its coat-tails."

"But you can prove the guy in it isn't you?" Jim persisted.

Blair gave a snort of laughter as he stood up off the couch to head back to the pile of papers waiting to be graded. "Jim, my name is Sandburg. Sand…_burg_…" he drew out the word, "if necessary you just freeze-frame one of the close ups and it's _very_ clear that the guy is _not_ a Jew. Anyway, you don't even have to go that far. If you freeze-frame the guy's face when he's turned towards the camera it's clearly not me even to normal eyesight."

"So why is the Dean trying to fire you on morals grounds?"

"She isn't. Chadwick Preston IV is." Blair paused at the doorway of his room and scored a perfect shot of the beer bottle into the trash can. "He's one of the jocks in my Anthro' 101 class and unfortunately he's Brad Ventriss reincarnated. He combines arrogance and stupidity with a rich daddy who throws money at him like confetti out of guilt for never being around."

"You flunked him." It wasn't a question but a statement; those same ethics that meant Jim didn't worry about Blair being fired due to some contractual morals clause meant that Blair insisted on each of his students pulling their weight in his classes. Nobody got a free ride because of a Congresswoman mother or a Fortune 500 Company CEO daddy.

"Yeah, he cribbed an entire essay from the 'Net word-for-word, didn't even change the date." Blair explained. "Then he _ordered _me to change his grade to an 'A' when he saw that poster of me. I kicked him out of my class and reported him to the Ethics Committee, so he ran straight to daddy and now Chadwick Preston III is trying to get me fired on moral grounds."

"How much of a problem is it?" Jim asked.

"Not one," Blair reassured over his shoulder, waving a hand to indicate Jim was missing the start of the Jags game on the muted TV as he went back into his room to carry on marking. "It's easy to prove the porn guy isn't me and it's easy to prove Preston Junior plagiarised the essay. When she fired me during the Ventriss case, Dean Edwards made a huge mistake and left Rainier wide open to me suing them – by not doing that not only did I claim the moral high ground but I have the entire Board by the proverbial. I only have to point out how once before Dean Edwards sided with a murderer for money and she'll back-pedal for all she's worth." He paused and added, maybe more to himself, "My problem is that Dean Edwards made another mistake last time in that she mistook my magnanimity for timidity. Tomorrow I shall have to make it clear that I own her academic ass entirely due to her own fault and that I won't tolerate a third incident like this."

"So she can't even hold the poster against you?" Jim raised his voice slightly as he turned the sound down to the threshold of _his_ hearing.

"Only theoretically," Blair called back as he sat down at his desk, "and if she does, I have the perfect defence that it wasn't gratuitous but for a worthy cause."

"Okay, Chief, but if you need any help, let me know." Jim offered firmly. "I defy even that woman to object to a cancer charity, but even if you had to pick that particular one to model for, like you said, it was still for a good cause."

_Yeah, well, having cancer of the balls is a great motivator._ Blair picked up his pen with a smile, feeling better for having Jim's support even if only in an emotional sense.

He yelped as he was hauled unceremoniously out of his chair by a big hand grabbing his arm. "Jim! What the hell -" he broke off as he looked into Jim's shocked and frightened face.

"You don't have…You look normal…" Jim didn't release his grip on Blair's arm, his anxiety almost tangible.

For a moment Blair was utterly flummoxed and then it suddenly dawned on him. "I actually said that out loud, didn't I?"

Jim wasn't listening. "I would know…" his voice faded and his expression became concentrated.

With a sense of shock, Blair realised that Jim was using his senses to check out Blair's…oh, _ick_. "Hey! No way! Ick, Ellison. Don't even think about it. It's icky enough knowing I can't even jack off in the shower in case you hear it." He pulled away from Jim's grip on his arm. "I _don't_ have testicular cancer and I never did."

"You just said…" Jim persisted, even though his sensory input indicated that Blair was a normal, healthy adult male.

"Okay, look I thought I had it…" Blair blew out a breath as Jim folded his arms in that immovable nobody-is-going-anywhere-until-Ellison-gets-answers stance.

Sitting back down in his desk chair, Blair rubbed his hand wearily over his eyes, despite his reluctance to have this conversation feeling comforted in the way that Jim's sole focus was on him; that total concentration could be very reassuring even as it was intimidating. "You know I started Rainier at thirteen as their prize prodigy on a full ride scholarship for gifted kids?"

"Yes?"

"Well I wracked up a zillion hours in the classroom but because of my age I couldn't do any fieldwork; Rainier was frightened of being sued. So as soon as I reached eighteen I went wild, in several sense of the word. You name the expedition and I signed up for it. It wasn't too hard because I'd already lived on every continent bar Antarctica by the age of ten and I already spoke nineteen languages. Anyway, at twenty I was in Berlin when the Wall came down and jumped at the chance to do a long-term study in Scandinavia and Western Russia on the anthropological effects of Glasnost."

Jim listened patiently as Blair talked of how he'd lived in Lapland, Sweden and finally Finland, aware of his Guide's elevated temperature and vital signs, all indicators of his distress.

"Anyway, I'm twenty-one and living in Punkailaden, a small village about forty kilometres outside Tampere in southern Finland." Blair explained. "One morning I wake up and well, I'm sore, down there. I have a tiny lump on one of my balls."

"What did you do?" Jim asked in concern.

"Absolutely nothing," Blair snorted in self-derision. "I was terrified to my bone marrow. The thing is, I essentially spent my adolescence living at Rainier University; I wasn't a grown up, but I wasn't a child – I was a healthy heterosexual male living in a place that was awash with booze, recreational pharmaceuticals and nubile young women – and none of them would touch me with a ten-foot pole for fear I'd get them into legal trouble. None of the beer parties or frat boys would let me with half a mile of them, the campus drug dealers ran from this gawky fourteen year old, but neither of those really bothered me."

Jim nodded; whilst he and Blair differed tremendously in their views on narcotics and had had to 'agree to disagree' on the emotive subject, Blair had never been the boozer/druggie type – they were crutches to avoid dealing with a person's real problems.

"What did bother me was that I lived my adolescent angst at Rainier as underage jailbait, surrounded by delectable co-eds who weren't going to get a corruption of a minor-stroke-statutory rape rap for anything in the world. By the time I was legal I'd been a walking maelstrom of hormonal lust-mush for years just waiting to explode. When I got that sore spot I went straight into a gibbering panic that I was going end up having to be medically castrated and I was never going get laid again. I spent every day desperately ignoring the terror in my hind-brain. I was twenty-two by the time the lump had grown too big and the pain too severe to ignore."

"Damn it, Sandburg," Jim whispered it as he took in Blair's haunted face and the pallor resulting from that remembered terror.

Blair shuddered. "I went to a doctor in Tampere. He took one look at me and sent me straight to the hospital where they did tests and kept me in for observation. The test results came back within twenty-four hours and this very polite Finnish consultant, Dr Haakala, sat me down in his office and in excellent English went through how they had an excellent treatment procedure and that my prognosis was very positive, yadda, yadda, yadda, and then at the end of about forty minutes of me sweating and shaking he casually mentioned that I hadn't got testicular cancer, just a very large cyst that had formed over an abscess."

"Cyst?" Jim repeated the word in relief.

"My reaction was a lot less polite." Blair confessed. "As in why he couldn't have told me straight away and how I'd spent the past eight months convinced I was going to spend the rest of my life singing soprano. At that point the good doctor retorted he hadn't told me immediately because he wanted to impress upon me how stupid I was and that if I _had_ actually had testicular cancer I would have been dead about two months before I went to a doctor."

"Chief…" Jim found himself lost for words.

"I never thought about death." Blair admitted with a shrug. "The idea that I might die had honestly never occurred to me. My sole focus was that the doctors might have to remove one or both of my balls and I'd never get laid again – all my unconventional pro-feminist upbringing and I was a classically conventional 22-year-old male solely focussed on being able to 'get some', talk about reverting to type. Dr Haakala told me that it was an even 50-50 chance as to whether the lump was a cyst or cancerous tumour and I was just extremely lucky. He was angry with me because he said that if it had been cancer, it would have been terminal, whereas if I'd gone to the doctor right at the beginning, if I had had cancer it could have been successfully treated and left me a healthy, fertile young man."

"But because you waited eight months…" Jim's stomach twisted as he realised how lucky Sandburg had been.

"Yeah. I had a very painful, much more difficult to treat cyst, but if it had been cancer, it would have been terminal weeks before I even thought about visiting a doctor – unnecessarily so." Blair reiterated. "It was that consultant, Dr Haakala, who was part of the campaign running at the time in Scandinavia to highlight reproductive organ cancers amongst men. The only way to tell whether I had a tumour or a cyst was by medical tests, you couldn't tell just from looking. Hell, I'd still been having sex with my long-term Scandinavian girlfriend until she left me for one of those post-Communist Russian millionaires a month before I went to the doctor's and she never noticed anything unusual."

"You volunteered to do the poster." Jim knew his friend well. Once the consultant's chastisement imprinted on the young man how foolish his delay in seeking treatment had been, Blair would immediately put aside his own personal discomfort and offer to assist in preventing others from making the same mistake.

"Yeah, I wanted it to be a photograph of me _before _I started my treatment to make the point. Medical professionals with forty years experience have looked at that poster and never realised that I wasn't perfectly healthy." Blair explained, "I felt I owed it to Dr Haakala. He was a great consultant and really took the time to reassure me. He was so sad when he explained how many times he'd seen terminal teenage boys and young men in their twenties come to his office when if only they'd sought treatment right off the bat when it was first just a bit sore or a tiny pea-sized oddity they'd have been curable with no lasting side-effects."

Jim sat down next to Blair, laying his hand gently on the other's forearm since his only other habitual display of affection, the noogie, was clearly not appropriate. "I've never even given it any thought, Blair. What you went through so young…I'm sure you helped save lives."

"I can only hope." Blair shrugged. "It just makes me so mad that slime like Chadwick Preston IV would use this to try and get me kicked out of Rainier because he's a spoilt rich brat and Marcia Money-is-God Edwards is helping. How that woman got to be Dean is beyond me." He gave Jim a reassuring smile. "Don't worry; I have Right, both morally and legally, on my side. It just pisses me off that I have to waste a day jumping through the hoops."

© 2005 & 2011, The Cat's Whiskers


	3. Chapter 3

**Disclaimer & etc: please see Chapter 1**

FINNESSE

**Chapter 3**

In the end, Blair decided to come into the precinct first as Jim was going in for six-thirty in the morning. He would have to leave at ten, but as he said, three and a half hours of work would make him feel less wretched about losing the afternoon to the Preston-Edwards circus.

Jim waited until he heard the Volvo pull out of the parking garage and then went into Simon and asked for permission to take an hour or so of personal time which the Captain, in an expansive mood over the cracking of two big drug rings, happily granted.

In Sweetheart, Jim made his way across town to the Cascade address of the medical charity that had reproduced the poster of Blair preparatory to running a new campaign. He entered the big warehouse building and found large numbers of people dashing about like disturbed ants. By the time he'd drawn breath to ask a question, half a dozen people had shot past at speeds liable to induce whiplash.

Cautiously Jim made his way through the chaos. Over in the far corner was a large cordoned off area that had been painted ivory with a huge fur-covered bed and very expensive photography equipment all round it; nearby there was a long line of young men about Daryl Banks' age who, despite being of all ethnic groups, had handsome features and "ripped" physiques. Over in another corner, an earnest-looking man in his late thirties wearing a white lab coat was practising an interview with a TV crew whose equipment sported the logo of Cascade's most popular regional station; he recognised Molly Stone, their eye-candy interviewer. Jim tuned in and just as quickly lost interest. The guy was reeling off stats and using words like "co-efficient" and had clearly lost Molly if her glazed expression was anything to go by.

Standing nearby to King of the Nerds was another guy who looked vaguely doctorish, who kept wincing every time Nerd-guy launched into another recitation of facts and figures. Since this man, who looked to be somewhat younger, say about thirty, was also the only guy who had stayed in one place for longer than ten seconds, Jim homed in.

"Excuse me," Jim approached, "Are you the one in charge here?"

"Apparently," the man replied dryly. "I'm Doctor Madsen. Can I help you?"

"I'm detective Ellison from Cascade PD -"

Dr Madsen frowned. "All our paperwork's in order, Detective, we've used this warehouse to produce our cancer awareness calendars without –"

"No, it's okay. It's just that…I know Blair Sandburg, I work with him… He told me what he went through at the time, and I wanted to make a donation."

"Oh. That's great." Dr Madsen smiled. "I knew Blair too, in Finland. It was very courageous of him to do the poster. It's that desk over there; thank you."

Jim nodded and headed in the direction indicated. He'd never been a big spender and was prudent with his money, so could afford to make a generous donation. He did support some charities, mostly police and military, but was very particular about where he gave his money, as a lot of charities spent inordinate amounts of money on administrative costs and political lobbying and so forth and little on the people they claimed to be trying to help. Although Blair would never know about what he'd done, it would make Jim feel as if he'd somehow done something to make up for not being there when Blair had been so alone and distressed those years before, illogical as that was.

He waited for the harassed woman to notice him as she was trying to deal with a mound of paperwork and six phone calls all at once. Idly he cast his sight and hearing out carefully, aware Blair wasn't present to haul him out of a zone, just to make sure the warehouse was structurally sound and there were no problems.

One of the men interviewing the long line of presumably would-be calendar models stood up and took a bunch of what looked like portfolios over to Dr Madsen, who flicked through them and then looked at the waiting line with what, to Jim's surprise, was a mixture of resignation and disappointment rather than gratitude for getting so many young studs willing to bare all.

Curiously Jim listened as the first man said, "These are the top candidates so far. We've got eight definite ones and four probables, unless any of these others turn out to be the next Brad Pitt in disguise."

"Are any of them _not_ students?" Dr Madsen asked wearily.

"Sorry." The first man shrugged, "I promise that's the first question I ask – what is your occupation? But there's not a cop, fireman, soldier, sailor, scientist, doctor or Fed amongst the lot of them."

"Damn. Thanks anyway." As the first man left to go back to his interviewing, Dr Madsen pinched the bridge of his nose with his thumb and forefinger in the universal gesture of weariness-with-stress-headache.

"What's wrong with none of them being cops?"

Madsen jerked his head up and blinked at Jim's question, fortunately too startled to realise that the other man must somehow have done the 'impossible' and heard him over the cacophony from the other side of the room. "I'm sorry?"

"I heard you say that you want police officers, fire fighters and military men. What's wrong with these guys?" Jim asked indicating the line of hunks behind him.

"They're not real men." Dr Madsen blurted and then sighed as Jim frowned.

Stepping back out of the way of the various people scurrying past to give himself and Jim a modicum of privacy, Dr Madsen said, "Sorry that wasn't what I meant. You said you know Blair?"

"Yes, we work together; he's my partner at the PD." Jim didn't go into the extraneous details.

"I was a med student in Helsinki, studying under Dr Haakala. He's one of the world's foremost consultants on male cancers, which get a loss less publicity than female cancers have much lower diagnosis and survival rates. Anyway, I met Blair when he was referred to Dr Haakala. What he did was very brave in doing that poster, and I have to admit it was our best selling calendar campaign ever at the time, but the problem was that Blair was a student, just like all these guys."

"So what?"

"So the impact of what we're trying to achieve is lost." Dr Madsen shrugged. "We include a brief three-line tag at the bottom of each month's photograph. But after the purchaser has read, '_Joe Bloggs is a twenty-one year old student at X University studying X'_ for the third time they know that the models are just college students making a little extra cash and they stop taking the _reason_ for the calendar seriously. They buy it, make a donation, but the calendar is bought for the hunk factor, and not because it's made them more aware of the dangers of male cancers, such as Well's cancer, penis or testicular cancer."

"So what good would having cops and firemen and soldiers as models do?" Jim enquired.

"Detective, did you ever work in Vice?" Dr Madsen asked.

"Yes, for a year before I joined the Major Crimes Unit." Jim admitted.

"Well, maybe you'll understand then when I say that testicular and other reproductive organ cancers in men are the HIV and AIDS of the cancer world." Dr Madsen said with the passion of sincere conviction and some obvious frustration.

"How so?"

"All over the world thousands of young, heterosexual men are dying slowly and painfully of AIDS because they were convinced that HIV was a fag disease that real men were immune to." Dr Madsen continued earnestly, "As far as most men are concerned, testicular and the thankfully much rarer penile cancers are the same. Guys are convinced that testicular cancer or cancer of the penis is something that red-blooded males and real men don't get. When anything does go wrong 'down there' they react exactly as your friend Blair Sandburg initially did – with blind panic and total denial. They're so terrified at the nightmare of having to have something surgically removed and being not a 'real man' anymore that the notion they could actually die doesn't occur until it's too late and that's the tragedy, because if they go to a doctor straight away, what they have is usually curable and treatable with the minimum of invasive procedures."

"I think I get where you're coming from," Jim acknowledged.

"I hope so." Dr Madsen sighed. "Just one photograph on one month of a ripped U.S. Navy Seal or a macho fireman or an Elliot Ness type FBI agent or James Bond CIA spook would be worth a dozen of these calendars in making the point that _any_ man can get these types of cancer, up to and including Medal of Honour recipients, 9/11 fire-fighter heroes, members of the thin blue line and so forth. Just one steely-eyed, square-jawed U.S. Marine Gunnery Sergeant on our calendar would make it cool to go to the doctor instead of being viewed as a wimp act."

Jim Ellison wasn't an impulsive man, or an exhibitionist; however, he looked at the line of laughing, preening, cash-hungry college students and thought that if he was responsible for just one terrified youth going to a doctor in time to save his life, then it would be worth it. "How about an Army Ranger Medal of Honour recipient and three-time Cop-of-the-Year winner?"

Madsen did a passable impression of a goldfish as his eyes bugged out and his jaw dropped. "Are you _kidding?_"

"Like I said, Blair Sandburg is my best friend. If he can do it, I can." Jim replied firmly, and then paused as inspiration struck with a double-whammy. "In fact, if you are able to delay the shoot a few days I can ask some more suitable candidates if they'd be willing to pose?" As he'd once admitted to Simon and Blair, the worth of his 'resignation' from Special Forces Black Ops depended on the price of the paper – he would enjoy chivvying a few old-buddy-old-pals into a worthy cause.

Taking Dr Madsen's wide-eyed expression of hope for the desperate 'yes' it was, he finished off, "Oh, and if you're willing to bump Mr Speaking-By-Numbers over there, I'll do the interview segment for you too."

Dr Madsen closed his eyes and drew in a shuddering breath. "We need to go to Canada." He intoned.

"Why?" Jim was nonplussed by this _non sequitar._

"Because I can marry you there," Dr Madsen answered with a grin the Cheshire Cat would have been proud of. "Don't take this the wrong way, but you're a beautiful man, detective. Wait right there."

Dr Madsen shot off like he was rocket-propelled and Jim grinned despite the butterflies that had suddenly hatched in his stomach as he absorbed the import of what he was about to do. However, he would never have survived his Army career or his stint in the Vice Division if he'd been the shy type. Besides, whilst he may not _quite_ have the sculpted six-pack abs of the young Turks in the queue over there, Jim was confident in his pleasing physical appearance. He did his Army PT callisthenics every morning for thirty minutes before hitting the shower, used the PD gym every other day and (okay, thanks largely to Blair 'Champion Nagger' Sandburg) ate healthily with low fat, sugar and salt intake. Without boasting he knew he had a body that men who were a good decade younger than himself envied.

"Detective Ellison?"

Jim looked up as the TV interviewer, Molly Stone, came over with her crew. He bit back a grin as he saw the glazed look dissolve as she finally realised he was going to be photographed in the buff and then do an interview with her. Dr Madsen was coming back also with the photograph and the lighting people, so Jim turned up the charm as he saw several ladies checking out the package. Blair was always telling him he would enjoy stuff if he relaxed and stopped fretting, so this would be as much fun as he made it…

© 2005 & 2011, The Cat's Whiskers


	4. Chapter 4

**Disclaimer & etc:** see Chapter 1

**FINNESSE**

**Chapter 4**

"You up for another beer, Chief?" Jim offered as he opened the fridge.

"Yeah, thanks man." Blair accepted the bottle gratefully from his position slouched in the armchair as Jim passed him.

Jim sat down on the couch and turned the sound on again as the adverts preceding the news came on. Blair ignored the essays on the coffee table still to be graded as he eyed his Sentinel thoughtfully. True to his pessimistic prophecy, the Special Review meeting had taken all afternoon, but Blair had emerged victorious, routing all before him. A freeze-frame of the impostor porn actor's face, thankfully right at the start of the sleazy movie, had shown clearly it wasn't him. He had also produced copies of the letter from Dr Haakala thanking him for his courage and willingness to make the poster in view of his painful illness, and finally he had taped Chadwick Preston IV's threats.

Blair had finished by bringing up the Brad Ventriss situation and stating how disappointed he was that for a second time the governing body of Rainier University seemed positively eager to discard academic principles and ethical conduct in a desperate pursuit of cash. That had ruffled some feathers but fortunately their ire had quickly settled on Dean Edwards rather than Blair. Chadwick Preston IV had been expelled on the spot, Blair exonerated and Dean Edwards formally censured.

Blair had returned home and related all this to Jim who seemed inordinately pleased at the news. In fact, Jim's mood in the days since had been persistently ebullient. While Jim was nowadays far from the sourpuss he used to be, humming to himself at work had never been his style and yet twice Blair had noticed him whistling cheerfully to himself. It was kind of scary.

Jim straightened up as the local news came on. Blair also began to watch in a vaguely desultory manner whilst reading the topmost essay with the other eye. Usually Jim watched the later news but Blair wasn't really bothered until…

"_We're back after the break. Please be aware that the next segment contains scenes of full-frontal male nudity and viewer discretion is advised."_

Huh? Blair stared at the screen, wondering what on earth that was about. He looked at Jim, expecting the big man to change channels on the spot, but Jim just sat there with a knowing smirk on his face. Blair's radar began to ping. Something was going on here. He waited patiently for the adverts to finish and the news to come back on, blinking as he recognised the cancer charity that Dr Haakala was patron of. He rung Dr Haakala's office and learned that this year's charity calendar was being shot in Cascade, which was why they'd reused Blair's image as publicity for the poster co-campaign.

All the breath seemed to leave Blair's lungs as the scene cut to the city's buses. Down the entire length of the bus was the giant image of a completely naked man. A naked James Joseph Ellison, whose only attire other than a smile was the gold detective shield hanging around his neck. He was stretched out on his left side in a pose identical to what Blair's had been. Propping his head on his hand, the shield dangled down next to his left nipple; his left leg was stretched straight out, the right drawn up so his right foot rested just behind his left knee. His genitals were clearly displayed between his open thighs, his penis resting on his inner left thigh. Dimly aware that he was making high-pitched _unnh-unh_ noises, Blair absently noticed the stark white lettering above the image that said: HAVING TESTICULAR CANCER IS NOT A CRIME.

"Breathe, Chief." Jim's tone was not outraged or furious, just vastly amused.

Blair opened and closed his mouth helplessly as his brain refused to compute the images. Jim. Naked. TV. Jim. _Naked._ _Jim naked on TV_. Error. Does Not Compute…

Molly Stone, the station's top interviewer, appeared on screen as the bus faded out. Seated across from her was none other than Jim, dressed in beige pants and his favourite sky-blue round-neck sweater. The same sweater, in fact, he'd worn to the precinct on the day of Blair's Special Review. He hadn't worn it since because it was in the wash – just before Blair had left to go to the Special Review, a suspect had tried to make a sudden escape dash from the MCU bullpen and ran straight into Ellison coming through the double doors, sending coffee all down the irate detective's front. The suspect had then run _back_ into the MCU bullpen for protection from Angry Ellison.

As always, Molly Stone introduced herself and then explained about the testicular cancer awareness campaign currently running. "And with me now is one of Cascade's finest. James Joseph Ellison is the Senior Detective in Cascade's elite Major Crimes Unit, and a three-time Officer of the Year Award winner. A former U.S. Army Ranger with the 731st Airborne, he achieved the rank of Captain, winning two purple hearts, the Military Cross and being a Medal of Honour recipient in his fifteen-year military career. Five days ago, however, Detective Ellison volunteered to quite literally be the new poster-boy for the current awareness campaign on testicular cancer. Detective, in a word: why?"

Obviously the segment had been pre-recorded, but Blair couldn't tear his eyes from the screen as Jim smiled his most charming smile at the woman and leaned very slightly towards her in a way that pulled the soft silky material of his sweater tight across his torso and round his biceps, giving clear definition. Not that anybody needed to use their imagination, in view of that up-close and lingering view of the bus!

"Well, Molly," Jim caressed her name as he said it, "as you know, the previous poster-boy that has been adorning Cascade's public transport is my partner Blair Jacob Sandburg, who is our Department's Consultant Criminal Anthropologist as well as being a Teaching Fellow at Rainier University. Now I admit it was a hell of a shock when I looked up from my breakfast pancakes at the _Finnesse _café and saw, well, that bus…"

The studio audience and Molly chuckled and Jim smiled and paused. Then he continued, "However, Blair had a cancer scare when he was twenty-one. He was too scared to visit a doctor and endured many months of pain and distress before he plucked up courage to go. Mercifully he had a treatable cyst not a cancerous tumour, but when Blair admitted to me that if it had been cancer, it would have been terminal by then, I realised how important this campaign is."

Molly nodded, her face changing to a look of concern. "So you decided to do something beyond writing a cheque for a good cause?"

Nodding, Jim lost the smile and looked grim. "In the four years since Blair began consulting with the MCU and became my partner, he has proven an invaluable asset to both me and the PD. I certainly wouldn't have made Cop of the Year for the third time without him. His extraordinary intelligence and innovative insights have been directly responsible for the Major Crimes Unit preventing terrorist attacks and major criminal operations. The people of this city owe Blair Sandburg their lives several times over. But I realised just how close we came to never being fortunate enough to work with Blair," Jim explained earnestly. "All because he was too scared to go to a doctor for eight months, if he had had testicular cancer, he would have died long before any of us knew him."

Molly Stone nodded, "Yes, you mentioned that Blair was twenty-one when he became ill but twenty-two when he sought medical intervention? But surely someone of Mr Sandburg's IQ would have realised –"

"IQ has nothing to do with it, Molly." Jim interjected, "Unfortunately it has everything to do what men perceive as a threat to their masculinity. If you're male, you could develop cancer of the testicles or the penis or prostate – whether you're black or white, whether you're seven or seventy, whether you live in Bel Air or on Skid Row. I'm a cop and I was a soldier so my hope is that by doing the poster I can help at least one guy to understand that it isn't weak or unmasculine or unmacho to go to a doctor if he finds that something is wrong 'down there' as it were."

"I understand that you've also posed for a month on the new calendar and been proactive sourcing its models?" Molly asked the leading question.

Jim's smirk bordered on the leering. "Oh yes, let me just say that this calendar isn't the usual college students posing for a few bucks. Several of my old friends in the services kindly posed too. But, to make my point, Molly, that's the real tragedy of testicular cancer," Jim wound down in a tone of suitable gravitas, "you see, testicular cancer is almost always curable with no lasting life-effects as long as it's treated in time. Hundreds of men die needlessly from testicular and penile cancer every year through no other reason than fear, because they wait far too long to seek medical advice." Jim looked straight at the TV cameras, "Not going to a doctor if you have a problem is not being a real man; it's being stupid."

"Thank you, Detective Ellison." Molly smiled. "The campaign starts with a vengeance on tomorrow morning, Saturday, which is when that calendar comes out too – mine's on pre-order. So look out for those buses, I know I will!"

The segment faded to the end credits of the news and Jim leaned back on the couch, grinning at Blair's stupefied expression.

Blair spluttered, "You…I…you…"

"Coherence through connectives, Chief," Jim advised.

"Aw, man, you didn't have to do anything like that…" but Blair's face was flushed with pleasure at the praise Jim had uttered on the segment.

"Yes I did." Jim interposed firmly. "If it prevents any other guy having to go through the emotional torment you went through, it will be worth it. Besides, it wasn't that horrendous to do." He smirked. "There was this blonde chick with the baby oil for the close up shots…"

Blair grinned in response, but then groaned. "Oh man, Jim!"

"What?"

"We only just got Bertorelli to _stop_ with those damn condom-balloon animals…"

THE END

© 2005 & 2011, The Cat's Whiskers

AUTHOR'S NOTE – Important, please read:

Yes, this story was fun to write, but it has a serious point to make. Once there was youth named Ben. When Ben was 16 he discovered a small lump on his testicles and then experienced increasing physical pain, but was so scared and in denial about things 'down there' that he kept it a secret from his parents, brother, family and friends and teachers, for two years until he finally went to a doctor aged 18. But by then the cancer had metastasised and spread up into his stomach and was inoperable and terminal. Ben died a few weeks after his 19th birthday.

When Sentinel Angst list member Gail Gardner invited me to Finland some years later one Easter, I accepted and took along my _**The Sentinel**_episodes for her to view. It was clear that her favourite was the scene in Season 2's _**The Rig**_ where the villainess earns our eternal forgiveness by ordering Ellison to drop the towel. (The chants of: _Naked Burgi! Naked Burgi!_ were also a big clue, _snerk_.)

That is when the seed for this story began to grow as a thank you to her. It had to involve Finland, Reindeer, Carellian Pancakes and both our heroes in the buff. I could manage most, but I wanted a plausible reason for the nudity. In the words of _Star Trek's_ Tuvok, a character's actions must not be contrary to their personality characteristics, which meant that someone like 'Jim Ellison' would certainly never strip for something frivolous.

That brought to mind Ben. Ben was a real person, and Ben was his real name and he really was just 19 when he died of secondary stomach cancer resulting from primary testicular cancer. Ben spent the last two years of his life in constant mental and emotional anguish as well as physical pain, but the true tragedy is that within the first three months of his illness, back when he was 16, if he had confided in his dad, his granddad, one of his uncles or gone to see a male doctor just to be on the safe side, the disease would have been treatable and today he would be a healthy 34-year-old man.

I did ponder about writing the story in this manner instead of going for a quick PWP snippet. I know most fan fiction writers are female (Bruce Alan Wilson, whose _**Jacob's Ladder **_series is on Susan Foster's GDP site is the only fan-fic writer I definitely know of who is male). I know most fan-fiction readers seem to be female. However, I hope that the ladies will read this and gain an awareness of how this disease can strike. I also know that (perhaps thankfully) most actors never read any stories based on characters they've played in the past. In the unlikely event however, I would hope Richard Burgi and Garrett Maggart would accept this story in the spirit it was written and approve of the cause I wish to highlight.

Most of all, I believe that this story can be relevant to _everyone_, regardless of gender. Due to environmental and industrial pollution, cancers of the human reproductive organs and other fertility problems are epidemic in the Western world amongst men and women. Far more Western couples are likely to suffer fertility problems, far more Western women are likely to suffer from endometriosis. In the last fifty years the quality and quantity of male sperm has plummeted in the Western hemisphere.

Breast cancer, ovarian cancer, cancer of the womb, uterus and cervix, testicular cancer and cancer of the penis are increasingly common in our society. However, a man is far more likely to die of testicular or penile cancer than a woman is to die of cervical, ovarian or breast cancer. Not because these cancers are more aggressive or more difficult to treat necessarily, but because in Western society when a man is ill, he reacts like Blair did in this story – with panic and denial. Going to a doctor is seen as weak, wimpy and unmanly and that attitude quite simply will kill you, or a man you love – whether he's your dad, brother, son, husband or best friend.

Basically, any good doctor will tell you that there are two entirely free and excellent ways of monitoring your own health and with the second one, the health of your partner too. The first, a bit unpleasant – is in the bathroom. Urine and faeces are excellent indicators of health. If your urine or stools change colour once, or you get constipation/diarrhoea/cystitis once – then there isn't really anything to worry about because, no pun intended, shit happens. But if there is a sudden repeated change without any apparent cause – you haven't moved home, changed your diet, work, just gotten married/divorced/become a parent, etc. then a trip to your doctor is advised. If you have young children, or provide personal care to a disabled or elderly person, you can also monitor their health in this non-invasive, discreet manner.

The second way of monitoring your own health and that of your spouse/lover is much, much more fun and greatly more enjoyable and it is also completely free: sex, and the more the better. You know what you like, but how knowledgeable are you about your partner's body? Use the fun to get to know your partner's body, quite literally, with your eyes closed – the shape, size, colour, feel and temperature of your lady's breasts or your man's balls and so on. Know how sensitive they are to touch and for any change that happens more than once. If something that usually results in a 'mm, yes' instead results in a sudden hitch of breath and wincing once, then you can put it down to being a bit heavy handed in your enthusiasm, but when something that always used to cause an expression of pleasure is now avoided or causes him/her discomfort, you need to note it and if it persists, don't allow him or her to dismiss it, but go to a doctor – as a couple.

The doctor will have much more to work with, and will take you seriously, if you can provide relevant specific information. Instead of letting your partner go to the doctor and mumble about "being a bit sore down there" at which point the doctor will hide a smile and mentally dismiss it, go with them and provide specifics – my wife's breasts are peach-coloured and usually cool to the first touch and her nipples are dark pink, but on the 21st of and since then I've noticed her left breast is warmer to the touch than the right one, and her nipple aureole has gone from dark pink to light brown and she has this tiny pinkie-fingernail red patch just below the underside of her breast/ my husband's testicles are red-apple coloured and usually very slightly warm to the first touch but on the 21st of and since then I've noticed his left testicle seems a bit hot to the touch more than the right one, and the colour has gone from reddish to brown and he has this tiny pinkie-fingernail red patch just at the base of his penis…

That explanation will get you taken very seriously and at this point your doctor will be arranging an appointment for scans and diagnosis. It might be a cyst, or a fungal infection, or nothing at all, but you might be saving a life – your own or that of someone you love.

If the above sounds totally over the top, I will repeat: Ben was _sixteen years old_ when he developed testicular cancer. Not forty-six or seventy-six. He wasn't even out of high school. Another boy, named Adam, was 20 years old when he was diagnosed with testicular cancer, fortunately in time to be treated.

Let me tell you another story: once upon a time, there was a woman who was married with children – she was a perfectly ordinary suburban working woman, except that for 3 days per month she was a bitch-queen from hell – vicious, volcanic and generally mad, bad and dangerous to know. Then one day, just an ordinary day, she began her menstruation and realised she hadn't spent the previous 3 days in a raging temper. In fact, she felt fine, just peachy. She was delighted, as was her husband and her family and friends – nobody was sorry the devil woman diva had forgotten her monthly appearance.

The next month was the same, and the month after that; ongoing relief and delight. One day she took the afternoon off work and met an old friend for lunch, and in the course of conversation, described this turn of events, even how her and her husband's sex life had perked up as a result of her non-ferocity. Then a shadow fell over the table and they looked up to see the stern-faced, middle-aged woman who had been seated at the next table standing there. She said that she was a midwife and had heard their conversation. She said she wanted the woman to go to the hospital with her immediately as she believed the woman had ovarian cancer.

The woman and her friend thought this was nonsense and outrageous to boot, but the midwife persisted and eventually they both agreed to go to the hospital with her. When they got there to the Casualty (Emergency Room in America) reception, the hospital staff on duty were similarly dismissive, but the midwife stated she would pay the cost the scan if she was wrong. The woman pleaded for a scan to "sort this all out" and the hospital was quite quiet at that moment, so they fitted the woman in for a scan there and then whilst her friend and the midwife waited.

After the scan the woman sat up on the trolley and asked for her clothes and shoes to dress. The doctor said to wait a moment and came back, not with her clothing, but her friend who was looking after her belongings. The doctor told them that she had thirty minutes to contact her family and advise them before she was taken down to theatre – one of her ovaries was completely subsumed by a grapefruit-sized tumour that was on the verge of going metastatic – medical speak for bursting, like a dandelion flower does when it goes to seed and spreads its spores all around her body. They had to operate immediately to save her life and stop the cancer getting into her bloodstream.

The operation was successful and they removed the tumour whole and she had no other cancer sites. In recovery, she and her husband and their friend contacted that midwife and how she had known just from listening what was wrong.

The midwife explained it was simply logic. A signature of reproductive organ cancers is hormones, which the cancer cells love. Every month, the woman produced too much of certain hormones, which travelled through her body to her brain and wreaked havoc. These hormones did not magically disappear or evaporate from the woman's body, they were still there as they had always been – so why were they no longer reaching her brain? Something had to be intercepting them and stopping them. The midwife noted that the woman hadn't had any major changes in her life, and nor did she mention anything about her breasts whilst discussing her 'happy' change of circumstances, and she mentioned love-making with her husband had improved, so there was clearly no vaginal discomfort, discharge or other change. That meant the 'interceptor' of the hormones had to be somewhere hidden, and unnoticeable, but really hungry to devour hormones – which left the ovaries.

The above story again might sound far fetched and I have anonymised it because the person is still alive and well today, but she did tell me how she had taken the midwife's warning to heart. Hormones don't mystically evaporate, and a sea change such as she experienced was a clear warning sign. If you man was a officer and a gentleman, and suddenly develops into a male nymphomaniac, once is not a problem, but a persistent change in libido needs investigating – likewise if your man is a fully paid up Captain Caveman who suddenly develops the sensitivity of Alan Alda and would much rather have a nice cup of tea, the question is – what is happening to his hormones, and why? Some reproductive cancers eliminate libido by gobbling up all the hormones, other reproductive cancers trick the body into producing excessive hormones and boosting libido like the body is on super-charged Viagra. The above also applies to the woman in your life.

The rule is this: a sudden change from the norm that continues after one or two occasions and which has no apparent cause (e.g. a change of diet, job, relationship, home etc) should be investigated by a medical professional. As Jim says in the story – it's not manly to avoid doctors. If you're a lady, you can use this story to encourage fidelity and monogamy in your man – the majority of men who develop reproductive cancers are saved by their wife, who notices the situation and insists a doctor is involved.

And if all this seems rather melodramatic and over the top, let me ask you one final question: Would you (a) rather feel a little foolish after being told by a doctor that you're are worrying about nothing or (b) be sat in front of some doctor telling you, or someone that you love, that you/they wouldn't now be dying of terminal cancer if you/they had had the situation checked out when the symptoms first presented and persisted…


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